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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

Knowing that there is something weird in your body sets off a cascade of medical care that easily escalates to surgery, anesthesia, medication to manage complications, side effects of that medication, time in the hospital being at risk for infection, etc. These things absolutely can kill you, or at least put you through hell. When there was actually nothing wrong with you in the first place. That is why the medical establishment is so conservative about it.

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Isn't the danger of knowing there's something weird there caused by the rarity of knowing anything at all?

I'd imagine that if there was consistent, good information available, we'd figure out how and when to act on it. The real issue is the massive cost of performing any given scanning procedure to everyone alive.

No. Doctors already think about this. Why do you think they aren't doing prostate scans and mammograms constantly on everyone?

I think modern medical ethics demands a physical treatment for literally everything and anything that's discovered, including quite a few that either aren't physically dangerous (e.g. atypical brains) or are inevitable (a 90+ year old with a laundry list of conditions). And, as other comments have pointed out, a panicked surgical response to a mammogram isn't based on time series data.

I totally understand and agree with trusting that medical professionals "know better", but I also would not conflate current practices with absolute perfection. It's clearly not a perfect profession or practice.

You don't have to conflate current practice with perfection. You just have to bother learning what the current practice is and why - and "it's just so rare to know anything" is not the correct answer. Just to start with basics: yes, actually mammograms are analyzed using time series data of a patients previous scans!

The question is not even what doctors think warrants a follow up. The question is what a malpractice attorney could construe as warranting a follow up, if it turns out later to have been real.

Once a scan exists, doctors are essentially forced to act on it. If an algorithm for deciding which scan results to pay attention to were so solid that it would hold up in court, that might make more scanning reasonable on the margin? I dunno though.

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